Number Three and Counting, #ACEP16 Swells

LAS VEGAS—With the ACEP annual meeting in full swing, #ACEP16 has become the third highest trending medical conference hashtag in the world this week! Not that we’re being competitive, but we’re narrowly trailing tweets from the Japan Council for Quality Health Care conference and the American College of Gastroenterology’s Annual Scientific Meeting. As an EM community, we must step up!

Dr. Brett Rosen (@EMDocBrett) tweeted “Some hypotensive trauma patients with positive FAST exam may benefit from CT scanning” from Dr. Swaminatha Mahadevan’s lecture on the latest in trauma literature. The dogma, of course, is that these patients need to be in the operating room, but apparently that’s not universally true.

Dr. William Brady and Dr. Corey Slovis gave a heavily attended lecture covering aspects of advanced cardiac life support that aren’t taught in certification courses. For example, what do you do for your patient with ventricular fibrillation or paroxsymal ventricular tachycardia? “If it’s not working, do something else! Consider Esmolol for refractory VF/pVT.” Definitely an interesting idea. Thanks to the Medical College of Wisconsin’s official twitter account (@MCWEmerMed) for that one. Always good to see the residency programs getting in on the game.

Also from Dr. Brady and Dr. Slovis’s lecture was a tweet by Dr. Kami Hu (@kwhomd) that, once again, highlights the importance of post-return of spontaneous circulation cardiac catheterization. “Immediate PCI for ALL post-VT/VF arrest improves rate of survival and neurologic outcomes.” That’s true of ST-elevation myocardial infarctions (STEMIs) and even non-STEMIs. In many places, the barrier to getting these patients to the lab is twofold: knowledge and the law.

Indeed, many state laws make these cases exceptionally risky for interventional cardiologists—if they, you know, want to stay in business. It’s all about liability and registry statistics—they need their statistics to be good in order for them to stay open. Understandable.

Dr. Dasia Esener (@SonoBoss) was impressed by some cutting-edge approaches to atraumatic musculoskeletal complaints in a lecture by Dr. Christopher Hogrefe. Apparently, there are studies suggesting that nitroglycerin patches may be effective for tendinopathy. “Wow, never heard of this,” Dr. Esener tweeted. Me neither. But a quick PubMed search yielded some interesting papers from the past 20 years. This is exactly why I love medical conferences: sometimes old tricks come as news to me.

Keep those #ACEP16 tweets coming! If we surpass our medical conference competition for trending hashtags, I may or may not be induced to taunting our competition online. How’s that for incentive?

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About the Author

Jeremy Samuel Faust, MD, MS, MA, is an instructor at Harvard Medical School and an attending physician in department of emergency medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston. Follow him on twitter @JeremyFaust.